Friday, 18 January 2013

Cast Your Vote for the 2013 Field Book Handwriting Award

By Emily Hunter, Field Book
Project

Break out your quills! As you may (or may not) know,
National Handwriting Day is quickly approaching on January 23rd. Sonoe Nakasone
posted
last year at this time about this important national holiday, selecting
Steven J. Arnold as the recipient of the Field Book Project 2012 penmanship
award. This year, I’d like to introduce you to a few types of handwriting that
we come across in field books. We’ve narrowed down to a few selections to
represent each category. However, we invite YOU to help us choose a Best in
Show.

The Graceful Script

The graceful
script hearkens back to a day when beautiful penmanship was respected. We
appreciate the time it took these collectors to dip their quills and make those
even, careful loops and dips. Both of our candidates were chosen because
their script is not just visually interesting, but also legible.

#1 E. A. Goldman. Goldman’s pretty
cursive hand in cyan ink is just delightful in this field book from Mexico,
describing mammals and birds he collected there in 1893. From SIA RU 007364. SIA 2012-1441. [click image for larger view]

#2 Frederick Kreutzfeldt. Kreutzfeldt’s penmanship didn’t suffer even while recording
in less-than-ideal circumstances. This account was made during his
participation in the Survey of the Northwest Boundary along the
38th and 39th Parallels, 1853, and may be the last entry before he died (read
more about that in a previous
blog post). We
admire his perfect line spacing and delicate calligraphic slant. From SIA RU 007157. SIA2011-2257. [click image for larger view]

The Utilitarian
Print

What
a relief to the tired eyes of a cataloger, to view the nice clean text of a
hand-printed field book entry. So easy to read! We chose the two candidates
below for being so meticulous and neat.

#3 James A. Peters. Peters, a herpetologist, has
a contemporary petite all-caps printing style. The entry above is from Peters’s
collecting trip to Mexico in 1949. Read more about the field notes of James A.
Peters in a previous blog post here.
From SIA RU007175.
SIA2012-6213. [click image for larger view]

#4 Arthur Stelfox. Nice printing in this index by Arthur Stelfox,
from his field notes on mollusca, 1911. From SIA RU 007379
. SIA2012-1436. [click image for larger view]

The Highly Stylized

This
type of writing is always a treat to read, as it always seems to reveal
something of the creator’s personality. The highly stylized hand can be full of
over-the-top flourishes and exaggerated slants (either left or right). Some are
round and bulbous, others are jaunty, others long and lean. Overall, we
appreciate the variety of this category.

#6 Martin H.
Moynihan. Moynihan’s writing is quite
lyrical with an interesting take on lowercase y's and f's and uppercase T's. Moynihan’s
field notes include behavioral observations of Cyanerpes, Panama, 1958. Read
more about Moynihan here.
From Acc.
01-096. SIA2012-1880. [click image for larger view]

The Nearly Illegible

Let’s be honest. These collectors had bigger fish to
fry than neatly writing in their field books. They didn’t waste time dotting
i’s and crossing t’s—they got the information down! Whether they were atop a
camel, in a helicopter, or off-roading, their handwriting records the necessary
information in a way that they (and maybe only they) can read later.

#7 Cleofé E. Calderon. Calderon’s books are full of
important contributions to the field of Botany, but they take some skill to
decipher. This entry comes from botanical field work in Brazil, 1976. Read more
about Cleofé Calderon’s
field notes here.
From SIA Acc. 12-005. SIA 2012-7486. [click image for larger view]

#8 Waldo LaSalle Schmitt. Schmitt’s field books are
fascinating, and yet some of the most difficult to decipher. View photographs from Schmitt’s field work in French Polynesia,
Antarctica, and Alaska, 1940-1963, on
Flickr. From SIA
RU007231. No negative number. [click image for larger view]

Vote for the Field Book Project 2013
Handwriting Award!

As
you can see, different handwriting styles can certainly yield different
outcomes, and directly affect our own appreciation of the content. We might romanticize
the script writing, we can easily read the utilitarian print, we make
estimations about the content of those written in the “illegible” style. How can
one choose a best in show, when comparing apples to oranges? So, we’d like to
open it up to you, dear readers. What do you think? Please cast
your vote for one of the field book handwriting samples above, via our Google
survey. We’ll share the results via Twitter
on National Handwriting Day, January 23, 2013. Thank you for voting!

Comments

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One of the masters is right there in the MVZ historic field notes. Please see volumes of Robert C. Stebbins, herpetologist and artist. I used to watch him write in the field and awesome. He had a special pen (expensive fountain pen) with Higgins eternal ink. He stopped and totally focused on the task at hand.
I could not write like that even back at camp at a picnic table! Check out one of the clearest writers of his time. RB Bury

The Field Book Project is an initiative to increase accessibility to field book content that documents natural history. Through ongoing partnerships within and beyond the Smithsonian Institution, the Project is making field books easier to find and available in a digital format for current research, as well as inspiring new ways of utilizing these rich information resources.